simple thinking for complex software

Swimming in Code: Recent Hacks

Sep 5th, 2010

Recently I’ve been on a hacking high, touching a lot of code, and in
touch with a lot of cool programmers. In retrospect I’m surprised at
the variety of stuff I’ve been doing, so I thought I’d write a short
list.

Misc

Closed-source

I have two main closed-source projects on my plate. The first, our
site about celebrities and the charities they support,
has seen me doing a bunch of Twitter API hacking recently. The second
project, currently Top Secret, is a Clojure data-oriented website,
using MongoDB and fun stuff like geocoding and data mining.

Thoughts

The programming ecosphere is more diverse than ever, and there are more
powerful tools available to programmers than ever before. It’s thrilling
to be involved with this, and to aid in the cross-pollination of tricks,
skills and idioms between unrelated projects. As a work-from-home
entrepreneur, collaborating remotely on open (and closed) source
projects with interesting people is a surprisingly good proxy for having
real officemates.